Abstract
John Caughie’s judgment in 2000 of the state of television scholarship about acting has sat heavily on this subfield of television studies: ‘Given the centrality of acting…to quality television and to television drama in general the absence of theoretically-informed writing about acting is surprising…there is very little about what actors actually do when they act’ (2014: 143). We may now be reaching the point where this is no longer the case since a considerable body of research and scholarship on the topic (much of it conducted by the authors whose books are being considered here) is growing in confidence, reach and rigour. Considering these two studies together gives the reader a good idea of just how productive and fascinating the field has become. It has also left this reader at least with a renewed respect, not to say awe, for actors and what they do.
Two features mark both books. Firstly, while other kinds of performers – reality TV stars, ‘ordinary people’ and presenters – are acknowledged, it is the work of actors in fictional representations that is being scrutinised. Secondly, the focus is entirely on UK television: deliberately and productively so, given the authors’ primary interest in the specifics of the work of actors. The approach of each book is, however, different. Hewett is interested in acting within the context of other practices and developments, such as directing, production practices, technology and actor training. His is an historical perspective, looking at acting across time and within the wider context of the development of studio television drama from a ‘live’/‘as live’ set of production practices to drama shot on film, usually on location, and edited in ways that bear comparison to large screen fictions. Each chapter is given over to a particular production practice – studio realism and location realism – and approached with a broadly common set of questions and a specific example to anchor the wider argument. The ‘spaces’ of the title are, therefore, in one sense literal and Hewett is interested in the ways in which actors encounter the camera in spaces shaped by specific technologies and practices. They are also metaphorical and Hewett acknowledges and explores the aesthetic and cultural spaces that actors inhabit when they are at work.
A second concern indicated by the book’s title is with realism. Hewett is not much interested in wider political or philosophical debates about this much-discussed term which is used here in its prosaic, quotidian sense, relating to observable behaviour and heavily conventionalised and culturally located verisimilitude. It is closely related to the spaces in which drama occurs and Hewett includes very useful tables that systematise the differences between studio and location realisms. The term is given an added frisson by the fact that Hewett’s main examples are from a genre normally regarded as the antithesis of realism, science fiction. Hewett is clear that he is not interested in science fiction per se, but is using it to enable comparison and to foreground acting choices. He notes the importance of a ‘base line’ of realism in the acting in genre fiction, necessary to anchor and make credible the world into which the science fiction premise intrudes. The validity of this approach is confirmed by the illuminating and detailed textual analysis that is at the heart of each chapter, which is used not to elucidate the narrative but to concretise the arguments made about space, the variety of actors’ approaches and training and directorial and production practices.
One issue that Cantrell and Hogg are not required to consider, but which Hewett confronts directly, is the historical specificity of acting: as anyone who has struggled to interest students in historical forms of television can testify, nothing dates a TV drama more than its acting. Hewett’s conviction that the work of actors is always of value and must be appreciated in its contexts provides much of the intellectual energy behind this book and is unanswerable.
In contrast, Cantrell and Hogg’s analysis largely addresses contemporary drama and looks outside the text to the hidden labour of actors. Its aim is to explore and value ‘the methods and insights of the screen actor’, drawing on the experiences of actors themselves (p. 1). The authors thus consciously challenge what they see as a dominant strand of scholarship about screen acting which prioritises ‘the analysis of end performance products over an understanding of the professional or artistic processes on the part of the actor’ (pp. 1–2). This is less true of the research published in the last 10 years, but it retains its force as a reminder of the dangers of reducing actors and their characters to a conglomeration of signs on a semiotic landscape.
At the core of this book are the testimonies of actors themselves, rendered as lightly edited transcripts of semi-structured interviews. Each chapter focuses on a specific genre and features interviews with established actors from some of the most critically regarded and popular of contemporary UK drama series such as Julie Hesmondhalgh ( Coronation Street (1960–)), John Hannah (Rebus (2000–2007)) and Penelope Wilton ( Downton Abbey (2010–2015)). In each chapter, an introduction situates the genre within contemporary television and the scholarship that has arisen around it, and a concluding section draws together the principal themes emerging from the interviews and contextualises them, critically and conceptually. The interviews are consistently interesting and are often perceptive, passionate and illuminating about the interviewees’ work as professionals in a highly pressured, complex and ever-changing production environment. To take two examples: Hesmondhalgh, who played the transsexual Hayley Cropper in Coronation Street, is unequivocal in her defence of actors in soaps and insightful in her view of their potential to explore the complexity of personal identities and social problems across time; and Roger Allam’s succinct and detailed account of the production processes that underpin single camera, filmed drama series in Endeavour (2012–) is a model of concision and clarity.
One of the chief pleasures of this book is the way that it brings questions that have lain under the skin of the meaning-making processes of television drama to the surface, notably those relating to issues of power, agency and authorship. The matter of who is responsible for what actors do on the screen is often seen as unfathomable or is (in some Film Studies discourse) ascribed to directors. However, as the book makes clear, actors are able to exert a considerable influence over what they do on screen, from ‘owning’ a character in a long-running series when writers and directors change, to collaborating in different ways with those directors and writers, to being given the licence to improvise in some contexts and genres (Rebecca Front’s account of her improvisations with Peter Capaldi during rehearsals on The Thick of It (2005–2012 is eye-poppingly hilarious).
Although very different in approach, there are many connections between Hewett and Cantrell and Hogg’s analyses. How genre shapes television acting is a thread through both books, evident in the contrast between different forms of popular drama under scrutiny (Cantrell and Hogg) and the single focus on science fiction (Hewett). Actors in such drama often rely on their own personalities to provide the emotional and psychological repertoire from which to construct their performances, and these become the means by which actors compensate for the lack of rehearsal in contemporary drama production. As Cantrell and Hogg observe, individual preparation also substitutes for rehearsal, and the moment of filming itself assumes vital importance, the point at which key creative decisions are made, challenged and revised.
Both books also foreground questions of training. For Hewett, training is a key to understanding how actors encounter – or not – the disciplines of screen acting, and his ongoing account of how drama schools have, until recently, largely ignored screen acting is telling. In both analyses, the work of the Russian acting theorist Constantin Stanislavski is central. Stanislavski’s approach has become the common sense of actor training (Hewett), giving actors an arsenal of strategies to apply to screen acting. Both books note the importance of an actor’s screen experience to her/his mastery of technique and of on-set mentoring by more experienced actors of younger colleagues.
These books do not aim to provide definitive accounts of television acting but they map some of the key themes of scholarship in the field: the need to pay attention to the histories of screen acting practices; the inter-relationship between acting and other production disciplines; and the value of actors’ accounts of their work, rendering the invisible visible. This makes them invaluable contributions to current research.